There is an old adage in the auto industry that says your car loses meaning as soon as you drive it away. The computer and technology industry is not so different, because new parts and systems constantly evoke an envelope of performance and value, which makes long-term use of the top-level system impossible. The purpose of this article is to step back 10 years and explore the technological landscape, and then see how it compares with today's technologies that we know and love.
Moore's Law:
Much has been written, and much is still being discussed about the aforementioned technological axiom; Moore's Law. Some people interpret the law as meaning doubling the power of a computer every 18 months to 2 years, while others support it, it means doubling the number of transistors (microscopic on / off switches, if you do), engineers can print to the same the amount of silicon. In fact, Moore stated that the number of transistors doubles every year, which, according to his later, is adjusted every 2 years. Despite this, this trend in transistor performance and growth has persisted for over 40 years.
More recently, Moore's law has been applied to graphics processors (graphics processors). At the time of writing the document on the GPU, in fact, it was not even 10 years old. The official term GPU was coined with nVidia GeForce 256 3D cards. Released in August 1999, it was the first chip that was able to calculate vertex transformations and pixel lighting in hardware. Since its release, graphics processing power has been consistent with a similar trend in doubling productivity every 18 months to 2 years. This article is not a technical document, but rather looks back 10 years ago to give you an idea of how far we will go in such a short time.
A bit of history About the author:
The year was in 1999. It was my sophomore / junior year in high school. Now I’ll stop so that 90% of readers who grew up in the 70s and 80s can turn their nose and stop reading.
Well, now that it doesn't work, go on.
I'm an internet kid. I got into computers and all sorts of electronic geekery just as the Internet became something that "just could catch." My high school was not exactly on the boring edge of technology, as it was, but we were one of the first public schools in my area that were equipped with a full T1 line and 1.5 Mbit / s of huge dedicated bandwidth, which she paged through the network. Our network was built from a mixture of interesting computers of PC computers (mainly machines with K6 200MHz / Win 95 processors), as well as network nightmares of Macintosh network engineers; LC II through the new G3 iMac.
In 1999, I was still swinging a 486 DX-33 PC with 8 MB of RAM and Windows 3.11 as my computer at home, while my parents had a good machine for the Pentium 100 Windows 95 computers by my brothers and sisters, and I will fight on time So, what was the point of these last paragraphs that you are probably asking? Well, that's where I was, and what I used 10 years ago in the field of computing technology, and I hope that it made you think about what you expected for a decade.
Processors:
10 years ago today, the computer world began to be frantic, preparing for the upcoming release of the new Intel Pentium III processor. The best money could be a 450 MHz Pentium II processor with PC100 memory. The rival AMD did an excellent job with selling its low-end K6-2 series processors. Currently, your average computer costs between $ 2,000 and $ 2,500 for a PC with a robust Pentium II processor. The Pentium III was due to be released on February 26th and was the subject of a vicious debate about the merits of its built-in unique identification number. Also noteworthy is the inclusion of the first SSE instruction set (a modern Core i7 processor is on SSE4 +). However, without the use of software designed for the use of new instructions, the processor was not much faster than the equivalent Pentium II processor with a clock speed, and there was some heat from the press.
Graphic arts:
On the graphic front, the war began between nVidia and 3DFx. NVIDIA, a relative newcomer to the field, traveled high above its very successful TNT video processor (Twin-Texel), while 3DFx struggled to maintain its market leadership with the Voodoo3 line of video cards. Voodoo cards were great performers, however TNT cards had the advantage of 32-bit color, while Voodoo were stuck in 24 bits. ATI has been around and kicking their Rage 3D-card series (especially popular as integrated chips on servers and workstations), but they never entered the hardcore 3D accelerator race until the Radeon line debuted in 2000.
The Internet:
In 1999, the Internet boom was just beginning and attracted a lot of attention and investment capital from around the world. The big business of that time was in the search and portal business. Yahoo, AltaVista, Excite and Lycos were perhaps the most recognizable and capable players in the industry. Google -say-wha? Other companies from other industries, such as television media and Internet service providers, noticed and bought Internet portals on the right and left, trying to use the viral spread of the Internet. New technologies, such as Java, are coming into their own hands and have begun to lay the foundation for the Internet, as we know it today. Studies have determined that by 1999, about half of American households had a computer, and most new computer purchases were made to access the Internet.
Other areas:
CCP quickly became new, you need to have a gadget Palm Pilot is a device that led the charge. I also had a Palm IIIe by the later half of 2000. Personal pagers were still hot sellers, but cell phones were becoming smaller and more practical and affordable. Also in the computer memory segment war was warming up. Samsung introduced new DDR memory chips that promised to double the effective bandwidth of existing memory chips in future settings, but Rambus was developing its own high-speed RAM for use in high-performance Intel systems.
Software:
This field may be too large to cover here, but a brief summary of the operating system: PC world was strong with Windows 98 and looked forward to the updated Windows 98 Second Edition, released in May 1999. The Macintosh crowd happily gathered on their Mac OS 8.5 machines, waiting for an upgrade to OS 9 at the end of this year. In addition, Linux became independent, since such large manufacturers as IBM began to build Redhat, Caldera and other distributions with some servers.
Conclusion:
I admit that this article was more for my amusement and memory than anything else. I hope that somewhere in the course of this mass of words and broken sentences you also had good memories of the past of computer equipment. It is good to remember the technologies with which we grew up, and, fortunately, it is enough for us to have the reliable Internet we are used to today to help create the images and technical characteristics of these glory days. Sites such as Tech Time Machine exist to help us survive these days and chuckle a little at equipment that we thought we would never use to the fullest extent. I remember the first time I touched the Pentium 200MMX, and I was delighted with my raw speed and seemingly endless possibilities. Now I am constantly frustrated with the speed of my current dual-core Athlon X2 6000+ processor with a clock frequency of 3 GHz. I can't even imagine how many windows that the Pentium 200 would throw out from today. This is a crazy world in which we live.
